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Friday, May 23, 2014

I read my first Christopher Moore novel in the 90s when I picked up a remaindered copy of Coyote Blue for cheap. I loved it, but for some reason or another it was more than a decade until I picked up another one of his novels. Lately I've been slowly reading his other books, including his most recent work, The Serpent of Venice, which I was lucky enough to get a review copy of.

Serpent of Venice is a sequel to the novel Fool. Fool was a parody of King Lear, starring Pocket, Lear's fool. This book also stars Pocket, and as the title suggests is (partly) a parody of The Merchant of Venice. It's also a parody of Othello with a dash of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" thrown in.

Being a Shakespearean parody, the book is fairly bawdy and uses a good bit of archaic language. Being a Christopher Moore novel, there is a lot of humor. There is also some fool on dragon sex, for the sort of people who get turned on by that sort of thing.

I don't think this is Moore's best book, but it's good, and it's funny enough that I laughed out loud at several points. It's well worth reading.